1

Version of chapter published in Hermann E., Kempf W. & van Meijl T. (eds.), Belonging in

Oceania: Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications, Berghahn Books, 2014, pp.

49-70.

‘Forty-plus Different Tribes’: Displacement, Place-making and Aboriginal Tribal

Names on Palm Island, Australia

Lise Garond

Palm Island residents commonly define themselves as Aboriginal and/or sometimes Torres

Strait Islanders, Murris,1 or ‘Blackfellows’, as well as ‘Palm Islanders’. Many of the islanders

also present themselves as belonging to one or several tribes and regions, from which they, or

from which their forebears, were removed during the colonial period, when Palm Island was a

government reserve. Today, with over three thousand residents, Palm Island, a small island in

north-east Queensland, is also one of the largest ‘Aboriginal communities’ in Australia.2 Until

the late 1970s and early 1980s, most of these localities were known as ‘Aboriginal reserves’,

or ‘missions’: places where Aboriginal people lived under the supervision of the state and/or

various churches.

In 1918 the Queensland government established a new Aboriginal reserve on Palm

Island. The new reserve was meant to receive Aboriginal people from various regions in

Queensland, a growing number of which were being removed to government reserves and

Christian missions, under the authority of the state’s ‘protective’ legislation (namely, the

Queensland Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897). From the

passing of this legislation at the end of the nineteenth century until the early 1970s, when the

removal policies were repealed, several thousand Aboriginal people (and to a lesser extent

Torres Strait Islanders) were removed to the Queensland reserves and missions, Palm Island

being the reserve which received the most arrivals from the largest number of locations.3 In

the 1970s, changes in government policies allowed people to leave the reserves and freely

circulate throughout the state. Some families left Palm Island, but the majority of people

remained on the island, which had become, for several generations, ‘home’.

While often very vividly expressing their sense of attachment to the island, places of

origin – actually known or imagined – seem to remain important to many of the islanders.

They often mention several such places or regions of origin as significant to them individually

or as members of particular families. As we shall see, the resulting multiple identifications

often involved not only relate to histories of origin and displacement to the island,4 but also to

2

a particular history of place-making on the island itself. One of the ways in which this is made

apparent is when islanders describe Palm Island – the place and the community – past and

present, as ‘made of’ the many ‘tribes’ which were sent to the island (forty, or ‘forty plus’, is

the number often mentioned). Palm Islanders’ notion of what is ‘tribal’, the importance they

seem to place on being able to claim one’s belonging to a tribe, and indeed on knowing where

one or where one’s ancestors ‘come from’, also reveal some of the struggles which the

islanders face as Aboriginal subjects. They have been and are subjected to particular

discourses which categorize/recognize them as Aboriginal, in diverse ways. By being sent to

the Palm Island reserve, for instance, one was also recategorized as a ‘problematic’ or

‘troublesome’ Aboriginal subject. Today, Palm Island and Palm Islanders are most often

represented in the mainstream media as epitomizing all sorts of ‘problems’, stereotypically

presented as endemic in ‘Aboriginal communities’, and Palm Island is often portrayed as a

place where Aboriginal people have ‘lost their culture’. By claiming their belonging to

particular tribes, Palm Islanders perhaps ‘respond’ to such negative stereotypes, while also

manifesting a desire to ‘belong’ to popularly recognized models of Aboriginality, construed

as bearing signs of ‘traditional culture’, models which have come to be fashioned,

importantly, in relation to the policies of recognition by the state of indigeneity and

indigenous land ownership. But what appears to be a late emphasis by Palm Islanders on

affirming their belonging to particular tribes is not reducible to a simple form of a ‘mimetic’

process of identification. A more complex process is at stake here, one which needs to be

considered in relation to Palm Islanders’ history of displacement and to place-making on the

island. In this chapter, I thus want to pay attention to what Palm Islanders’ identifications in

terms of tribes and tribal names may tell us about their particular, and often ambivalent,

senses of place and belonging (and not belonging) as Aboriginal subjects.

Place-making in the Palm Island Reserve

Palm Islanders’ histories and experiences of displacement, and of place-making on the island,

in the former reserve and the present community, are not unique among indigenous

Queenslanders, or more broadly among Aboriginal Australians, although the anthropological

literature has tended to focus on ‘traditional’ ways of relating to place in remote areas,5 and/or

in contexts where Aboriginal people had historically rarely experienced large-scale

displacements and/or confinement to a single place.6 This relative lack of interest has perhaps

tended to obscure the fact that there are particular and often ambivalent senses of place and

3

belonging that these historical circumstances have contributed to shape, rather than simply

change or erase, among Aboriginal people.

By removing Aboriginal people from their places of belonging, the colonial

administrators in charge of the protection policies had several ambitions in mind, including

that of ‘erasing’ the memory of familiar places of belonging and being in order to instil into

them new forms, and reformed, ‘habituses’ (see Henry 2012).7 However, permanent

displacement from familiar places, and from the familiar senses of self in relation to others

that this familiarity with place nurtures, does not only result in the loss of one’s day-to-day

‘relational’ sense of place (Ingold 2000). Displacement, as an experience, can be considered

as a particular sense of place; that is, for instance, the sense of missing familiar places,

remembering and imagining them, as well as the sense of finding oneself in unfamiliar places,

can be viewed as particular ‘senses of place’ (Feld and Basso 1996). Indeed, as Barbara

Bender notes, ‘dislocation is also relocation. People are always in some relationship with the

landscape they move through’ (Bender 2001: 8; see also Bender and Winer 2001). In this

sense, displacement not only disrupts but also engenders senses of place, leading to new

forms of place-making.

In the first section of this chapter, I will attempt to describe some of the conditions of

place-making in the reserve for those who were removed there and had to make their ‘place’

in this peculiar location. The notion of ‘place’ can be differentiated from that of ‘space’ by the

process through which a mere spatial location becomes a place as it is invested with lived

experiences of being in place, memories and meaning (see Casey 1993; Henry 2012). Place-

making is also a process through which social identifications and differentiations are

produced, reproduced and contested, that is, a process through which the meaning of place as,

for instance, one’s site of belonging or exclusion, at the same time as the corresponding social

identities and boundaries, are made (Henry 2012; see also Keith and Pile 1993; Massey 1994).

Judith Butler (1997) uses the expression ‘place-holder’ and ‘site’ (the site of a discourse) to

designate the ‘subject’, somehow figuratively: in some cases, however, discourses literally

conflate with ‘placing’ individuals in spatial locations. The case of prisons, studied by Michel

Foucault (1977), is an example, as are the ‘Aboriginal reserves’. Indeed, to be removed to the

Palm Island reserve meant that one had been and continued to be designated as an ‘Aboriginal

subject’, in need of ‘protection’ and/or punishment.8

Similar to other mission and government reserves, the Palm Island reserve was

designed on segregated patterns. The white administration’s quarters were located in an

enclosed area, adjacent to which stood three enclosed dormitories: these were to receive

4

women and children, a large number of whom were removed to the reserve on the basis that

they were of mixed descent.9 This central area was ‘out of bounds’ to most Aboriginal

residents, and placed under police surveillance. A bell which stood near the police station, as

older islanders recall, ‘governed’ the lives of Aboriginal inmates, signalling times to go to

work and to bed. Police patrols, composed of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmates,

also patrolled the rest of the reserve and areas further away from the central area, where the

Aboriginal ‘camps’ (as older Palm Islanders describe them), made of iron-sheds and grass

huts, were scattered. Further away from the camps, the surrounding forests, hills and beaches

remained uninhabited, and Aboriginal residents were not supposed to venture there without

permission. There are many stories of escapes from the dormitories and breakaways from the

reserve to these ‘wild’ areas, as islanders describe them. When sent to the island, Aboriginal

people were not allowed to leave the reserve, except when they were able to obtain from the

administration, on demonstration of ‘good behaviour’, a permit which allowed them to spend

a night or a couple of days on the mainland, under police escort. By contrast, many tourists

visited the reserve. They were received in the central area, and were entertained with

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dances. As one older resident put it, hence describing

one of the most significant features of life in the former reserve: ‘tourists came, but we never

go out’. Despite the intense restrictions placed on the movements of Aboriginal people to and

from, as well as within, the reserve, the inmates were regularly sent to the mainland to fulfil

work arrangements between the administration and various employers in need of cheap

labour, especially in the agricultural and cattle industries. Some Palm Island elders remember

the time they spent on the mainland as periods of freedom away from the reserve, while

others insist, on the contrary, on their bad experiences and their longing for ‘home’, away

from their families. Although they often express much resentment about the past, older Palm

Islanders also frequently share fond memories of some aspects of their life in the former

reserve; their feelings about the old reserve, and indeed, their sense of attachment to the

island, seem to be weaved through with much ambivalence (see Garond 2011). A place of

displacement and exile, the island is also described as a place from which one could be

separated and which one longed for; this is one of the ways in which displacement, as a

prominent theme in Palm Islanders’ accounts of themselves and their family histories,

becomes constitutive of place itself.10

Within the reserve, the space allocated to the Aboriginal camps was also divided, as

some of the older Palm Islanders recall, into several different ‘tribal camps’, areas within

which people from the same ‘tribes’ grouped together. Most older islanders remember that

5

there were six or seven different tribal camps in the reserve. ‘What happened when we came’,

an elder explained to me, while pointing in different directions:

all the people in my tribe, and the Clumpoint all stayed in the Clumpoint down Dee

Street, that area. And on the other side was the people from further up from Cooktown

and that, you know… And here, were most people from Ingham area. And over that

side, that was the Sundowners, so they were mostly in that area. But here and right up

there were the Lama Lama.

While Lama Lama is the name of an Aboriginal language and a language-named tribe,

Cooktown, Clumpoint or Ingham are the names of localities or small towns from which

people were sent to the reserve, and at which or near which they had until then lived (when

they hadn’t been removed there from somewhere else). While the latter are not ‘classical’

Aboriginal tribal names, Palm Islanders refer to them as such. Up on one small hill was the

‘Sundowners’ camp’: it grouped together those who had been sent from ‘out West’, or from

different places in far-western Queensland. The ‘old people’ from that camp, I was told, were

known to be ‘crying for their country’ while looking at ‘the sun going down’, towards the

direction of their former homeland.11

‘Everything was strange. All these strange people. When my mother found somebody

that could talk her lingo it wasn’t so bad’ (Rosser 1985: 160). Iris Clay, in this short account,

was telling her friend and Aboriginal author Bill Rosser how it felt like when she first arrived

on Palm Island as a child with her parents and some of her siblings in the early 1930s. Other

siblings were left behind and never seen again when the family was sent to the island from

Mapoon, a Christian mission for Aborigines at the north-western tip of Cape York. Iris’s

father had been convicted of practising ‘witchcraft’, and so punished by the administration.

As more and more people from different regions were sent to the island and had to

accommodate to this ‘strange place’, with ‘all its strange people’, as Iris Clay puts it, different

‘groupings’ seemed to have so reformed or formed more or less anew within the reserve.

Making one’s own place in the reserve, was, among other things, a process of boundary-

making, in a Barthian sense (Barth 1969), as well as more literally in a ‘spatial’ sense: a

process of creating and recreating identities and differences, in and through place. This

process operated on an everyday basis in relation to the white people occupying distinctive

areas and distinctive houses (as opposed to ‘the camps’). It also operated amongst Aboriginal

people, associating with and differentiating from (more or less similar/different) others in

6

place. Islanders in fact often talk literally of ‘boundaries’, delimiting each camp and

separating one camp from another, boundaries which are said to have been the cause of

constant tensions among members of different tribes: ‘if you crossed that boundary’, one

middle-age resident thus explained, ‘they’d spear you in the leg!’ Fighting, sometimes

involving spears or boomerangs, is also mentioned as a distinctive ‘tribal’ way. Maintaining

distinct ‘boundaries’ between the various tribes was necessary to avoid disputes, I was often

told, while also allowing for the existence of a sense of ‘community’ within each camp.

However, I was also told that the delimitation of different camps, separating different tribes

from each other, had been part of an administrative strategy to ‘divide and conquer’ those

who were under its surveillance, preventing them from organizing a collective uprising, for

instance, or ‘a riot’, as one resident put it.

The notion of tribes as distinct social entities was indeed part of the administration’s

‘knowledge’ of Aboriginal people, in a Foucauldian sense. Some of the bureaucrats who had

specialized in ‘Aboriginal affairs’ in the late nineteenth century, such as Walter E. Roth, who

was also one of the earliest ethnographers in Australia, had developed an extensive

‘knowledge’ of Aborigines, ranging from linguistic knowledge to that of ceremonies, kinship,

marriage and racial categories (with Aboriginal people commonly classed as ‘full-blood’ or

‘half-caste’). ‘Tribes’ or ‘clans’ were conceived as small and bounded social entities.12

The

notion of what was ‘tribal’ was also somehow synonymous for administrators and experts

with what they saw as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’, often with a mixture of both disdain and

admiration.13

Less detailed forms of such knowledge were commonly held by the local

administrators of the reserves: in many colonial official letters and reports, it is frequent to

find references to ‘tribal fights’ occurring (or at risk of occurring) within a reserve. The word

‘tribal’, was in general meant to designate practices (such as ‘sorcery’) that the

administration, in its reformative view, aimed at progressively suppressing within the

reserves, but which could be accommodated in some of their features. For instance, while the

practice of ceremonies or the use of Aboriginal languages was officially forbidden, the

making of ‘artefacts’ and the performance of ‘corroborees’, especially for visiting tourists,

was encouraged.

It is difficult to know precisely when or how the spatial layout changed, and when the

tribal camps started to disappear, but it seems that throughout the 1950s if not earlier the old

grass and iron-shed houses were more systematically replaced with sturdier dwellings, this

being part of the increased accent in state policies towards ‘assimilation’, the transformation

of Aboriginal habituses into ‘European’ ones. The ensuing change in the spatial layout,

7

although sometimes understood as a natural outgrowth of inter-marriage between different

tribal groups, is also regularly interpreted as a direct result of the administration’s will to ‘split

up the tribes’, as an elder described it, to dismantle the scattered camps in order to create a

more homogeneous – and less distinctively ‘Aboriginal’ – space. However, people’s ‘tribal

origins’ seem to have continued to play a significant role within the changed residential areas:

it is sometimes said to have induced new tensions among residents, and sometimes, on the

contrary, people insist on the solidarity existing within new spaces of sociability – all the

more remarkable, and in some regards all the more enjoyable, that people ‘came from’

different places. As one resident, recalling her childhood on Palm Island in the 1960s, put it:

In our area, the Lama Lama area, everyone sort of knew one another. We all sort of

grew up together, and everyone had an open house for people. We used to go to this

house, and they would give you a feed, to that house, and they would give you a feed.

[…] Some people from Aurukun was there, Kowanyama I should say, and some

people from the Torres Strait, so it was … everyone knew each other, you know?

Somehow, stories about the ‘tribal camps’ are foundation stories about Palm Island

and about the present Aboriginal community. They are histories about place-making, and

more precisely about Aboriginal place-making, within and in spite of the reserve. In this

narrative, the role of the state appears somehow uncertain. There are different and

contradictory hypotheses about the involvement of the administrators in the setting up and

demise of the tribal camps. This is perhaps illustrative of a more fundamental questioning

among Palm Islanders about of what Trouillot calls ‘state effects’ (Trouillot 2001). There is a

questioning about the degree to which the state, or the experience of living in a reserve and

being subjected to the authority of a white administration, has weighed not only on their lives

but on the manner in which they experience and represent themselves as Aboriginal people.

Nevertheless, Palm Islanders seem to conceive of the notion of tribe as a social, specifically

‘Aboriginal’, category, one not invested with its colonial connotations, and relatively

autonomous from the state. It could be argued that Palm Islanders’ conceptualizations of tribal

camps as bounded by place, of tribal identities and of what ‘tribal’ means generally in fact

demonstrate how state effects operate. In this case, for instance, it could be argued that it is

the very colonial differentiation between what is ‘tribal’ and what is ‘civilized’, including in

the spatial layout of the reserve and the differentiation of Aboriginal from ‘white’ spaces of

living and types of habitation, which was partly productive of Palm Islanders’ conceptions of

8

what is (or is no longer) ‘tribal’. But rather than the mere imposition of colonial categories, I

would suggest that it is the overall experience of place-making in the reserve which is partly

productive of Palm Islanders’ perceptions of what is tribal. In addition, Palm Islanders’

insistence on this notion today, and the value that they attach to it, also stems from their

experience of the late recognition, notably by the state, of indigenous identities.

Tribal Identifications and Desires of Belonging in the Era of Recognition

Palm Islanders of various ages often express a sense of loss, a sense of having been alienated

from their ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture. This is sometimes expressed with more or less

resentment or sadness, as in ‘we have been assimilated’, ‘we have lost our culture’, or ‘we’re

not really tribal anymore’.14

This sense of alienation is not only a consequence of historical

experiences of displacement and of living in a government reserve, but also exists in relation

to ongoing discourses about the recognition of indigenous identities in terms of recognizable

signs of ‘authentic difference’ (Povinelli 2002: 45). To Palm Islanders, identifying in terms of

tribal names, and in reference to a corresponding ‘territory’, is a sign of ‘traditional’

Aboriginal culture. This practice has, however, been described by anthropologists as a rather

recent phenomenon, notably an effect of the ‘native title era’ (Fingleton and Finlayson 1995),

an era during which new possibilities emerged for indigenous people to claim land ownership

on the basis of (and proof of) enduring relationships with the land claimed. These new and

regulated possibilities seem to have played a part in a growing tendency amongst many

Aboriginal people to rearticulate land-based identifications using broader collective identities

or ‘tribes’ (see Glowczewski 1998; Merlan 1998; Smith 2000, 2006; Bauman 2006).

In the case of those who have been, or whose forebears have been, displaced under

colonial legislation, identification with a tribal name and genealogy often becomes the

principal means by which claims to land can be effectively made. This may differ greatly

from the manner in which those who have not experienced displacement (or at least not to

such an extent) formulate their attachment to the land. And while the latter are able to do so

on the basis of enduring practice and precise knowledge of the places at stake, they may also

contest the validity of the claims made by formerly displaced or ‘diaspora’ people,15

which

tend to be formulated in a more reified way or on the sole basis of genealogy (Smith 2000,

2006). As Smith mentions, this questioning or rejection by ‘local’ Aboriginal people of the

validity of ‘diaspora’ people’s participation in land claims can be resented by the latter as a

form of ‘double denial’ (Smith 2006: 230): while they were first displaced by the state from

their land, their claims can also now be questioned or rejected by other Aboriginal people, if

9

not by the state. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s, the possibilities of recognition have

triggered, and persistently trigger, a desire to be part of Aboriginal land claims among many

Palm Islanders.

I take as an example that of Lorna, a woman in her eighties who was born and grew up

south of Cairns, in the Tablelands, before being sent as a young teenager along with members

of her family to Palm Island.16

She vividly remembered the Tablelands, and despite her

removal she had managed to remain in contact with some of her relatives still living there

over the years. She had also been able to return to this place while she was still an inmate of

the reserve during work placements. In the 1970s, she started to return to the Tablelands more

frequently, and during the 1990s she had been included in a native title claim for the area, and

had been able to participate regularly in native title meetings, which had given her more

occasions to travel there over the years. In her words: ‘Whenever I can get a trip back up on

the Tablelands, I’ll take it, because it’s all up there […] All I think about is going home, I

really want to take my grandchildren, take them to show the country, show them this is where

I was born, where your grandfathers, where your uncles were born’. The possible recognition

of her belonging to this area had triggered an increased desire to ‘go back’ to this place, one

which had remained always significant to her but which now constituted a more tangible

reality. However, she did not wish to return there permanently: most of her closest relatives

lived on Palm Island and in the nearby coastal city of Townsville, even if, as she put it,

‘There’s also a big family up there, you know’. She liked her current residence in Townsville

because it is relatively close to both Palm Island and the Tablelands, and thus allowed easier

access to both ‘homes’. As she stated, ‘It’s home there [the Tablelands], but I sort of like this

home too, you know, I grew up here too’. However, she also mentioned the embarrassment

she felt once whilst sitting at a native title meeting, finding herself surrounded by people –

many of whom were younger than her – who had spent most of their lives at, or close to, the

place to which the claim related. Many around her could speak ‘in language’, as she put it –

that is, in the Aboriginal language traditionally spoken in that area – either partly or fluently,

whereas she, unable to do so despite her advanced age, felt ‘like a child’ among them, she

added. But this did not appear to undermine her sense of the Tablelands as her ‘home’, and

her sense of pride in being able to identify as ‘coming from’ this second home.

In many other cases, places of ‘origin’ are not known or are not known with any

precision. This is particularly the case for those, and the descendants of those, who were sent

to the island as young children without relatives, or without an administrative record or

precise information about the rest of their family and the places where they were born or had

10

lived before being sent to Palm Island. Fairly often, people were sent to other places, missions

or reserves, and on work placements, before reaching the island, rendering their descendants’

own ‘histories of origin’ all the more uncertain. The lack of knowledge about one’s or one’s

forebears’ places of origin is often experienced as a sense of uncertainty about oneself. As a

result, many Palm Islanders undertake research into their ‘family tree’ in order to ‘trace back’,

as they often put it, their genealogy. Family histories are often searched in the archives kept

by different institutions, especially Queensland’s state archives, sometimes in order to

constitute the genealogies relevant to native title claims. However, this kind of work is more

often undertaken as a more general means of reconstituting disrupted histories and

genealogies, with the hope of discovering or confirming places of ‘origin’ or the existence of

relatives whose ‘trace’ was ‘lost’ as a result of separation and displacement. However, while

the archives produced by the churches, the state or the police contain a massive amount of

information, including some of a very personal nature, they often lack the very kind of

information that people are looking for, and that when they are not inaccurate or have been

destroyed.

On a few occasions I was asked if I could help research in the archives, although the

Palm Island friends who asked me had usually already contacted the archival institutions at

stake, and had been disappointed not to have found what they sought. In one instance, in

learning that I was on my way to undertake research in the state archives in Brisbane, Mandy

asked me if I could try to find information about her mother, and especially about where her

mother was born. ‘We don’t know who she is’, she stated. Yet, to my great surprise, she went

on to explain that her mother was alive and living with her. As it goes, her mother had been

sent alone to Palm Island in the late 1930s as a young child. She came from south Cape York,

‘somewhere in the bush’, Mandy explained. Although some relatives on one side of her

family were known, uncertainty about the other ‘side’ meant that places of ‘origin’ remained

only partially known. Her previous research attempts had left her dissatisfied: ‘We couldn’t

trace her’, as she put it. Not knowing precisely where her mother ‘came from’ was causing

Mandy (and probably her mother as well) a painful sense of uncertain identity, all the more so

because research in the archives had been unsuccessful. Although she was ‘from Palm

Island’, she did not cease to feel that she was also ‘from’ somewhere else, no matter how

uncertain this other location was.

Alongside research attempts, and although they have an exceptional character, stories

of reconnection with long-lost family members are also told. Patrick, for instance, a man in

his forties, told me of a trip he undertook to Mount Isa, about 1,000 kilometres from Palm

11

Island in western Queensland. This was the approximate area where his mother was born and

from which she was sent to Palm Island in her youth. She had not been able to keep in touch

with most of the family she left behind, but she had told her own children about them. When

Patrick travelled to Mount Isa, he did so in the hope that some of them some still lived nearby.

At a pub, he happened to sit next to an old man, who suddenly turned to him and asked him

where he was from. As Patrick replied that he was ‘from Palm Island’, the old man ‘started

crying’. He had recognized Patrick as being his nephew, his ‘lost’ sister’s child. Straight

away, recalled Patrick, he met ‘all the cousins, nieces and nephews’. He also had family in

south Queensland, and found he had ‘family all across’, as he put it. These relatives, some of

whom had only recently been discovered, were closely linked to his parents’ and grand-

parents’ histories of origin and their displacement to the island. By virtue of these

relationships and histories, he explained how he identified with several tribal names (some of

which related to far-away regions). But Palm Island, he strongly asserted, was his ‘home’. He

also mentioned that he had ‘connection’ to the island’s ‘traditional owners’, and thus that he

was also Manbarra as well as Bwgcolman, two tribal names which are associated in different

ways with Palm Island, and have started to be more commonly used by Palm Islanders

(although some of them say that these names were never used before) in the wake of the

‘native title era’, when a native title claim was lodged regarding the island.

At the beginning of the 1990s, an Aboriginal land title recognition process was

engaged on Palm Island. An anthropologist assisted this process by collecting information

about those who could be identified as the ‘traditional owners’ of the island; that is, those

whose ancestors were already living on the island before the reserve was established. The

identified people were designated as belonging to the Manbarra people, the name of the

‘tribe’ which originally lived on the island. Since this time they have become more frequently

acknowledged, especially on special and public occasions, as the ‘traditional owners’ of the

island and of the other islands surrounding it. In accordance with the process of identification,

and the language used in native title claims, the remaining population of the island (that is,

nearly all of the island’s residents) were identified as ‘historical people’: those whose

belonging was acknowledged as resulting from their ‘historical’ (rather than ‘traditional’)

relationship to the island, or, in other words, from their displacement to the island.17

In fact,

no native title per se has been formally recognized since the early 1990s, and the present land

status of the island corresponds to a recent and less formal ‘land use agreement’ between the

local Aboriginal council – representing the ‘historical people’ – the ‘traditional owners’ and

the state.

12

Over the last few years there have been periods during which the island’s Aboriginal

ownership has been more intensely discussed among the islanders, producing tensions

between the ‘historical people’ and the ‘traditional owners’. On several occasions, for

instance, I was told by different ‘historical’ people that the Manbarra were ‘not really’ the

traditional owners, either because those who doubted them suspected them of having been

brought, like others, to the island, or because they appeared to them to be lacking enough

‘traditional’ knowledge about the island. The ‘historical people’ sometimes also express

resentment at their belonging to the island being questioned by their differentiation from the

‘traditional owners’. Interestingly, however, Palm Islanders very commonly use the term

‘historical people’ to designate themselves (as well as the term ‘history’). One older resident,

doubting that the Manbarra were ‘really’ the ‘traditional owners’ of the island, thus claimed

that ‘this place started off as a penal settlement!’ Being ‘historical’, for Palm Islanders, does

not necessarily mean that one does not belong to the island. In fact, histories of displacement

to the island, and of living in the former reserve ‘under the Act’ (as the former policies are

commonly referred to) are also histories of belonging to the island.

As well as Manbarra, another Aboriginal name, Bwgcolman, which in the local

Aboriginal language designated the island, also started to be more commonly used on the

island in the 1990s in the wake of the native title era. It started to be used to name in another,

more ‘Aboriginal’ way those who had been designated the ‘historical people’. It appears that

the name was previously known to some people, and could be at times used to designate all

Palm Islanders as belonging to the island. In its current use, depending on the context,

Bwgcolman may have more or less inclusive connotations. At times, it specifically designates

all those who are not the ‘traditional owners’, that is, the ‘historical people’, and their

descendants. This is especially the case, when Bwgcolman is used in contexts when the issue

of Aboriginal land rights is discussed. But sometimes, Bwgcolman refers to those who were

born on the island only. However, it is also often used as a collective Aboriginal name for all

Palm Islanders. There is also yet another meaning for Bwgcolman: ‘all the tribes in one’, or

‘island of many tribes’, a common Aboriginal identity based in the collective experience of

displacement and of place-making on the island, and more precisely as part of the history of

the ‘tribal camps’ in the Palm Island reserve.

The ‘Suburbs’, the ‘Wild’ Areas and the ‘Camps’

Today, some of the residential areas are still named after the former tribal camps, although it

is mainly older people who possess detailed knowledge of where these used to be. The current

13

residential areas, spread across a much larger space than during the reserve era, somehow

form separate clusters, often named ‘suburbs’ and organized around what still constitutes a

central area, often referred to by islanders of all ages as ‘the mission’ (and also including

surrounding habitations). This central area, as with the former reserve, is constituted of

administrative buildings, that of the local council as well as of various public service

agencies, such as the social welfare centre, hospital, and supermarket, owned by the

Queensland government. In the same area, Mango Avenue, the street along which Aboriginal

people were forbidden to venture in the past, and in which most of the white staff lived,

remains primarily inhabited by non-indigenous workers, who occupy most of the qualified

positions at the hospital, police station and two schools. One end of Mango Avenue leads to

Dormitory Drive, named after the three dormitories previously located there. Other streets are

named after certain localities on the mainland – becoming ‘tribal names’ on the island – but

also quite often after certain individuals and families who lived there – including a number

whose current members still do. Individual and family histories are emplaced on the island,

determining each one’s particular relationship to certain places there. For instance, a young

woman proudly old me that she ‘remained’ a ‘Farm girl’, although today she no longer

resided at the Farm, one of the island’s residential areas, named after the farm which operated

during the reserve era. One particular street in this area was named after her family, numerous

members of which, herself included, had resided there ‘as one mob’ after it was developed in

the early 1970s. However, she also felt related to her new area of residence, closer to the

central township, because this was where her grandfather had built his own house in ‘the old

days’. People’s family histories of place-making on the island are thus somehow

determinative of their belonging not only to the island but also to particular places on the

island.

The largest surface of the island remains uninhabited, at least at first sight: wild pigs,

as well as many wild horses (brought when the reserve was set up, and later ‘gone wild’), can

be found in or behind the hills, where dense vegetation grows. These areas are sometimes

described as ‘wild’, and I was told on many occasions ‘wild people’ may ‘still’ live there:

creatures, usually described as ‘short’ and ‘hairy’, as well as semi-human semi-spirits are said

to perhaps ‘descend from’ the ‘tribal people’ who used to live on the island before the reserve

was settled, and who managed to ‘escape’ to the hills. They are said to occasionally appear to,

and scare, those who venture in these areas, including white people (in fact, many stories of

‘wild’ beings involve white people being scared off).

14

Away from the residential areas, around some of the island’s beaches, islanders have

established camping sites since the 1970s (when circulating freely outside of the reserve

became possible). Some people go there for fishing, or to spend the night with family

members, but others live there more permanently, often when they have no other place to stay

or wait for government housing to become available to them. These camps of small self-built

dwellings resemble the former ‘tribal camps’ I was told. Here, away from ‘the settlement’ and

‘the mission’ (that is, all the residential areas), people told me one is able to experience a life-

style which is closer to the way in which the ‘tribal people’ used to live. One’s family’s

particular history of place-making on the island matters in the manner in which camps have

been settled around the island. One woman thus explained how the location of her camp

depended on her family’s former place of residence on the island. Other families, living in

nearby residential areas, had also established camping sites near this extremity on the island,

while those who had mostly lived in other areas had usually established them at another place,

or on two small islands nearby. Although it was fine for her to visit some of her relatives or

friends at another camping location, she didn’t feel comfortable spending the whole night

there: this would make her feel ‘out of place’, she insisted. ‘This is how it was set up’, she

said.

The ‘Tribal Banner March’

Each year since the late 1990s on Palm Island, the ‘tribal banner march’ is held as part of the

NAIDOC festivities – a week of national celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

cultures.18

In places where the celebrations are held, a march usually takes place, with

participants holding the Aboriginal flag and/or the Torres Strait Islands flag, sometimes

together with the Australian flag. On Palm Island, the march takes a particular form, since

participants usually march with various other flags or variously decorated banners, which bear

the names of the different ‘tribes’ with which the islanders identify themselves.

‘This is for our future, for our children, so that they know […] how Palm Island was

set up, and about our history, how our community is made of forty-plus different tribes. But

you know today, we stand, and we all recognize, and see ourselves, as the Bwgcolman

people’.19

This was the short speech that the Palm Island council’s mayor gave after the 2007

‘tribal banner march’. The event is an occasion during which this ‘history’ is somehow

commemorated, while offering participants the occasion to display, with some sense of pride,

their belonging to particular tribal groups. Tellingly, for the NAIDOC celebrations and the

tribal banner march, one woman had decorated a tee-shirt with the contours of Palm Island as

15

viewed from above. Below this, she had written the name Bwgcolman, and inside the island

she had placed the names of other tribes that she identified with, as if the corresponding tribes

were somehow emplaced on the island. Another woman had also written several tribal names

on the back of her tee-shirt, explaining that other names could well be added in the future,

because these were only ‘as far as I know, as far as I’ve tracked back the history’.

The event also takes the form of a contest for the best banner, and a jury is usually

designated to select the winner based on the quality of design, each banner being very

colourfully and beautifully decorated. However, banners are not always replaced on a yearly

basis, and some may use the same ones for a number of years, only changing the date on it.

Selection for the banner contest therefore seems to rely on diplomacy rather than the

application of selective criteria. Interestingly, two non-Aboriginal individuals had been

appointed judges at the last minute by the Palm Island councillors during the 2007 march.

This, I was told by an Aboriginal resident, was partly motivated by the idea that most

Aboriginal residents of the island would have made ‘biased’ judges because of their own

connection to, and thus preference for, particular tribes. The Bwgcolman banner finally won

the competition, with two runners-up. A young woman, whose banner came second, told me

with disappointment that the Bwgcolman banner ‘seemed to always win’, even though, from

her perspective, it was ‘not really a tribe’, but was ‘made up to talk about everyone’ in a way

that prevented identification with a particular ‘side’. Under different circumstances, however,

she would call herself Bwgcolman. Her critique implied a sense of competing identities, one

of which (Bwgcolman) risked appearing fabricated when placed in competition with other,

and in her view more ‘authentic’, ones. I was told by another participant that the Bwgcolman

banner was ‘really more for the kids’, because some of them did not yet know ‘where they

come from’ and ‘which way to go’, and thus decided to walk with the Bwgcolman banner.

She identified herself as Bwgcolman, however, since she was ‘born here’, as she stated, but

she usually marched with her ‘father’s side’s’ banner.

The Palm Island mayor had walked behind the Bwgcolman banner too, on which it

said in small characters ‘Palm Island Council’, whereas the previous year another Bwgcolman

banner had as a subtitle ‘Island of many tribes’. The mayor told me how she would usually

walk with another banner, and that there were several different banners which she could

choose to walk with. Her position as the council’s mayor (she had been elected the previous

year) partly motivated her choice in walking with the Bwgcolman banner this year, she

admitted. Doing so, she sought to promote a sense of communal ‘unity’, while also remaining

somewhat ‘neutral’ in not choosing a particular ‘side’. In walking under the Bwgcolman

16

banner, the mayor seemed also committed to showing the council as a unifying and

diplomatic representative of the community. As she explained to me on another occasion, one

of the difficulties of her role was being ‘diplomatic’, because ‘there’s all these different

personalities, and you try to work on bringing everybody together, because we all want to see

Palm Island developing, we want basic services’. ‘Bringing everybody together’ was thus a

matter of being able to efficiently negotiate with the government for ‘basic services’, a

diplomatic play somehow symbolically performed at the tribal march in front of the two non-

indigenous judges. Interestingly, the latter were the council clerk and a representative of

Queensland state’s Department of Communities (which is notably in charge of ‘Indigenous

affairs’). In some sense, the position of these judges seemed to mimic the way in which the

state regularly poses as judge of the authenticity and legitimacy of Aboriginal claims in native

title cases, while it also reflected Aboriginal people’s desires to be recognized by the state.

But equally important was the performance and recognition of a ‘well-functioning

community’, in which differences and rivalries were diplomatically negotiated.

Palm Islanders’ ‘imagination’ of the community cannot be immune from the existence

of ‘community’ as a ‘bureaucratic category’ (Kapferer 1995), and from its representation (and

the representation of Aboriginality) in often derogatory terms, for instance as ‘dysfunctional’

(Garond 2012a; 2012b) 20

. The ‘imagination’ of social tensions within the community in terms

of tribes is not limited to ‘mainland’ representations of Palm Island, as Palm Islanders usually

refer to ‘outside’ and generally non-Aboriginal representations of themselves. It also seems to

be part of the way in which Palm Islanders tend to conceive of the social fabric, the

community and its ‘making’. For instance, reflecting humorously on conflicts among people

in the community, a Palm Island woman told me that:

family’s going against family for who’s going to be the best, but no one is gonna be

the best! And they say that they’re Bwgcolman people, but Bwgcolman people is one

mob, we belong to the Bwgcolman tribe now! You know that’s all the tribes in one,

and you keep pushing that Bwgcolman people all the same, even though we come

from these tribes but … we all live on this island!

During a public meeting, one of the island’s councillors declared, that ‘government always

tries to divide us. We have to show that we are unique, that even if we come from forty

different tribes, we have a plan’. Interestingly, I was also told by one islander that what makes

17

Palm Island ‘special’, and in a different sense ‘unique’, is that ‘people come from all these

different tribes’.

Conclusions

Throughout this chapter, I have tried to describe how Palm Islanders’ identifications, and in

most cases multiple identifications, with various tribes relate to their historical experience of

displacement and of place-making on the island, a former colonial reserve and now an

Aboriginal community. By identifying themselves with particular tribal groups, Palm

Islanders situate themselves as individuals and members of particular families in a network of

relationships which somehow relate the island to many other places, be they experienced,

remembered or imagined. At the same time, they situate themselves within a social fabric,

conceived at times as made of a multiplicity of ‘groupings’, whose presence ‘made’ and

‘makes’ the community and the island as a place imbued with a particular history. A notion of

‘cultural loss’ (along with a desire to overcome such loss) and an objectified model of

Aboriginality continue to impinge on the manner in which Palm Islanders identify as

Aboriginal subjects, and on their sense of belonging – or not really belonging – to the models

of authentic Aboriginality which they themselves value as such. However, there are particular

Aboriginal senses of place and belonging which have been produced, rather than simply

‘lost’, throughout Palm Islanders’ history of displacement and of making the island their

place, and these particular senses of place and belonging in fact challenge an objectified

model of indigeneity grounded in places of ‘origin’.

18

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21

Notes

1 ‘Murris’ is a term used by many Aboriginal Queenslanders to designate themselves.

2 Palm Islanders commonly refer to the place where they live as an ‘Aboriginal community’.

The expression is also a bureaucratic term, designating localities at which a large majority of

Aboriginal people reside, and which are administered by a local, Aboriginal council towards

which particular state policies are directed. 3 Historian Mark Copland estimates that between 1918 and 1972 more than 4,200 people were

removed to the Palm Island reserve (Copland 2005: 150). 4 I use the term ‘origin’, in ‘places of origin’ or ‘histories of origin’, to emphasize the

importance which this seems to have for Palm Islanders, as a time and place ‘before’ being

displaced to the reserve, whether or not origin places and histories are actually known with

precision. The term ‘origin’ (and ‘original’), which Palm Islanders often use to refer to such

places, also denotes a notion of ‘authenticity’ that plays a very significant role in relation to

the value that Palm Islanders ascribe to tribal names, as we shall see. 5 Among the rich anthropological literature on the subject, see e.g. Myers (1986), Rumsey and

Weiner (2001) and Poirier (2005). 6 But see Morris (1989), Trigger (1992), Merlan (1998), Cowlishaw (2004), Smith (2006),

Babidge (2010) and Henry (2012). 7 The following quote from a 1913 report by a protector-in-chief is particularly revelatory: ‘I

think that any child whom the Protector considered should be separated from aboriginal

conditions should be taken away as soon as possible so as to leave as little remembrance as

possible of the camp in the child’s mind’ (William Bleakley, quoted in Blake 2001: 56). 8 Palm Island was chosen as a reserve for its remote location in order to serve especially as a

penal settlement. Overall, administrators in charge of ‘protection’ policy could issue orders

for removal to reserves or missions: ‘illegal’ employment, refusal or inability to work, the

committing of any offence and poor health or disease were common reasons for removal, as

well as being found ‘destitute’ or being categorized, for children and young women, as ‘half-

caste’ (see Kidd 1997; Copland 2005; Watson 2010). 9 The policy led to what is now commonly referred to as the ‘stolen generations’: Aboriginal

children and young adults who were separated from their families and placed in white foster

homes and institutions (see Haebich 2000). 10

Among several other Palm Island songs, this short song, adapted from an original version

from the Torres Strait Islands, evokes the island as a place of belonging and longing while

one is separated from it: ‘Old PI, my beautiful home / That’s the place – or there’s a place /

Where I was born / And the moon and the sky that shine / Make me longing for home / Old

PI, my beautiful home’. The variation ‘there’s a place’ is often sang, notably by older Palm

Islanders, who were born ‘elsewhere’. See also Neuenfeldt (2002: 114). 11

The Sundowners are usually said to have mainly comprised people belonging to the

Kalkadoon and the Waanyi tribes, with which many of today’s islanders identify. 12

There are obvious parallels here to the Australianist anthropology of the early decades of

the twentieth century (Merlan 1998). 13

In one of his texts, Archibald Meston, for instance, expressed his admiration for those he

represented as the ‘real wild warriors’ (in Thorpe 1984: 59). In fact, looking at the abundant

literature that they produced, it was towards a different category of Aboriginal people,

especially those who lived near towns and were of ‘mixed descent’, that white experts were

prone to show the most visible disdain, although here again with some ambivalence: they

22

tended to represent them as both more ‘civilized’ than the ‘wild’ or ‘tribal’ Aborigines, but

often as having adopted the ‘sins’ of white society, while remaining ill-adapted to it. Those

perceived as such were most at risk of being sent to the reserves. 14

The ‘old people’, on the other hand, as Palm Islanders commonly describe those

(irrespective of age) who were removed to the island in the early decades of the reserve, are

often referred to as having been ‘very tribal people’; similarly, Aboriginal people living in

remote parts of Australia, in particular in the central desert, are also referred to as ‘very

tribal’, in the sense that they embody, for Palm Islanders, a living ‘authentic culture’ that they

themselves experience as more or less partially (depending on their various perspectives on

the matter) ‘lost’ or ‘lacking’. 15

A few anthropologists have also started to use the term ‘diaspora’ to qualify more

specifically Aboriginal people’s attachments to the places from which they were removed and

away from which they currently live (Rigsby 1995; Smith 2000, 2006; Weiner 2002). 16

The name Lorna is a pseudonym, as are other first names used in this chapter to identify

Palm Islanders. 17

In this context, two definitions of Aboriginal attachment to land have been extensively used

to demarcate certain attachments from others, identified in earlier anthropological accounts as

‘historical’ and ‘traditional’ (Trigger 1983). Following such definitions, almost all of Palm

Island’s population would be defined not as ‘traditional’ but ‘historical’ on two levels: in

relation to the places from which they or their forebears were removed, and in relation to the

island itself to which they or their forebears were removed. 18

NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee) springs from one

of the first major Aboriginal civil rights movements, the 1938 Sydney protest march, held on

Australia Day (which then marked the 150th anniversary of the landing of the British fleet on

Australian shores in 1788). It was only later, in the 1970s, that NAIDOC events started to be

held regularly at a national level but on a different date to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander ‘cultures’, at a time when the notion of ‘culture’ started to be more consistently

objectified as an object of national and state recognition. 19

Mention of the number of tribes which originally or which currently ‘make’ up the Palm

Island community seems to originate in rather recent investigations into the early history of

the reserve in the wake of the native title ‘era’, especially investigations into the data collected

by the anthropologist Norman Tindale in the late 1930s, notably on Palm Island. Tindale

collected many Aboriginal genealogies around Australia during this period, and he pursued a

particular interest in identifying affiliations to ‘tribes’, which he equated with Aboriginal

language groups, and identifying these groups’ geographical ‘boundaries’. Tindale, with this

‘old-fashioned’ approach to social organization, produced a map of Australian Aboriginal

tribes (Tindale 1974). 20

Ongoing national public debates on socio-economic and health issues within indigenous

communities commonly feature the term ‘dysfunctional’, a generic term aimed at describing

the ‘problems’ that indigenous communities face; what is generally described as

‘dysfunctional’ is the presence of unemployment, welfare dependency and alcohol abuse,

together with a lack of ‘leadership’. The term ‘dysfunctional’ was frequently used, at the time

of the 2007 march, by political figures and journalists in reference to the highly mediatised

events which took place in 2004 on the island: the ‘riot’ following the death of an Aboriginal

man, Cameron Doomadgee, in the island’s police station (on these events, see Hooper 2008;

Glowczewski 2008; Garond 2011). In many media accounts, Palm Island was subsequently

portrayed as a typical ‘dysfunctional’ community, this dysfunction being brandished as cause

of the ‘riot’ (rather than the death in custody itself). Interestingly, ‘dysfunctionality’ was often

linked to an original ‘tribal’ heterogeneity, designated as a direct cause of the supposed

23

endemic conflicts opposing the island’s ‘families’, rendering any collective project, or the

management of the community council impossible.